The Original Acronym for S.P.E.A.R. Was Cancelled Due To Political Correctness
Part 1.
The SEALs I was coaching the Advanced Combat Training Group a private SPEAR Combatives Course and the instructors saw me write a bunch of SPEAR Drills on the whiteboard.
I used the term over and over during the weeklong training and finally, one of them asked me what SPEAR stood for - they assumed it was an acronym!
You know the military and their love of acronyms - well, that planted the seed.
"Spear" was originally used metaphorically, (it wasn't an acronym), I used to say "spear the attack" meaning impale it, charge the threat.
We would work on ‘jumping the attack’ by focusing on the earliest possible pre-contact cue and impaling the attack or spearing the attacker.
I began thinking “What could spear stand for?”
Right after my trip to Coronado, I headed to Normandy, France to train a private client and I kept thinking about SPEAR as an acronym.
I was already experimenting with the startle-flinch response (1986) and we had coined the expression: "spontaneous protection".
Something was percolating in my mind!
Within five minutes I wrote out "enabling aggressive retaliation" to complete the acronym:
SPEAR: Spontaneous Protection Enabling Aggressive Retaliation.
I was so excited, I called the guys in Coronado from France and told them they had inspired the acronym - they loved it!
Fast forward a couple of years and SPEAR is spreading through the combatives community, but when it hit the law enforcement world, the word "retaliation" met with severe resistance.
I argued that SPEAR was a counter-ambush system and that an ambush must be met with ‘aggressive retaliation’.
Still, I met with resistance.
Trainers weren’t allowed to attend my courses, agencies changed the name of my system so they could slip some of the drills in.
It was so frustrating!
Here I was trying to save lives and created a system and an acronym that empowered the people I was training. The acronym actually helped with the counter-ambush mindset. And it was being blocked because of political correctness!
By this point, I had invested almost 10 years studying the flinch response and had created so many drills to help weaponize the movement, but I knew if I didn’t come up with some new name, political correctness would prevent many police officers from learning my system.
I spent days thinking about this and then it hit me!
SPEAR is the only system in the world entirely based on the body's natural survival reflex.
And learning how to convert the flinch, to weaponize the flinch, required an appreciation of our body’s primal response to sudden danger.
There is magic in it because the flinch response bypasses cognition and it produces a ton of kinetic energy making it so explosive, so powerful! And if you tapped into that, if you grasped this, your confidence changed dramatically.
And just like that, I had the acronym:
Spontaneous Protection Enabling Accelerated Response.
To be honest, as soon as I came up with the new acronym, I knew it was the right choice because it firmly tied the flinch to physiology and kinesiology.
I loved that the movement was based on real science and real movement!
And here we are, 30 years later!
Coach B
SPEAR is now taught worldwide to law enforcement, military, public safety, firefighters, EMS, healthcare, and other first responders. And, of course, it's also taught to martial arts & self-defense instructors and everyday citizens.
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